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Thursday, February 20, 2014

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by Ian Culbard

Lovecraft has always been a subject of interest for folks looking
to adapt works to other media. He’s probably the literary figure of the last
century who casts the largest shadow, in terms of direct and indirect influence.
I’m thinking of this, in part because of my fascination with the new HBO series
True Detective and its allusions to
Lovecraft with images of “a spaghetti faced man” and “the King in Yellow” (by
way of Robert W. Chambers). But Ian Culbard’s series of graphic novels adapting
Lovecraft consumed me even more when I encountered them recently, and they are
perhaps the finest adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories I’ve yet seen.

If there’s one single thing that characterizes Lovecraft’s writing,
both good and bad, it’s his awareness of and emphasis on dread. Dread, for
Lovecraft, is the key to horror. And dread is best achieved through
anticipation, apprehension, and fear for what is about to be revealed.
Essentially, you don’t dread something you can see and know – it’s about the
terror of the unknown.

Therein lies the problem with adapting Lovecraft, particularly
to a visual medium like film or comics. The history of comics in particular is
littered with bad Lovecraft adaptations. In part this is because Lovecraft had
the luxury of using words rather than images to suggest the most horrific and
terrifying things, to point toward, that is, instead of directly pointing out,
his subject. And luxuriate he did, sprawling his language deep and wide with
often purple prose all in service of obscuring what he was writing about. The
horror, his stories suggest, was in part due to the confusion of never quite
knowing for sure what’s going on.

Most cartoonists have sought to cleave to Lovecraft’s prose
when looking for the solution to Lovecraft’s inversion of the old “show, don’t
tell” adage. Murky, heavily inked or darkly colored drawings accompanied by
large chunks of Lovecraft quotes was the typical “go to” answer to the question
“how do you make Lovecraft comics?” Unfortunately, this makes for a pretty
miserable read—stuffy, stilted, and neither as moody or immersive as Lovecraft’s
prose, nor as visually captivating or as lively as comics can be.

This is where Culbard really shines. His previous works
(three adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories and his art on the odd yet
entrancing police-procedural-meets-the-Walking-Dead-by-way-of-Downton-Abbey
series The New Deadwardians are among
the best) showed and interest in, and facility for, both the art of adapting
popular works and period illustration. However, his clean style, with its
simple, bold brushwork suggestive of an animation background, would not appear
to be a good fit for Lovecraft. He proves that wrong. These adaptations,
particularly The Strange Case of Charles
Dexter Ward, do a great job of getting at that dread, in part by kicking to
the curb much of Lovecraft’s prose in order to get at the heart of the story in
a very “comics” kind of way. He suggests, hints, teases at the horrors behind
the actions we observe.

All in all, each of his adaptations (he’s also done At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time) is solid and
well worth a look, but in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, he gets at what is
both great and difficult about Lovecraft – it is moody, steeped in dread,
confusing, terrifying, complete and yet riddled with unanswered questions—all that
delicious and maddening about Lovecraft all at once. I loved it so much I
immediately found Culbard’s other adaptations through the Library, and went
back and reread the original Lovecraft stories as well. And that’s another
thing these adaptations get right—like the best translations of an author’s
work to another medium, they invite new readers to the author’s work and
provide surprises and delight for those familiar with the original.